Page:History of Art in Phrygia, Lydia, Caria and Lycia.djvu/236

 22O HISTORY OF ART IN ANTIQUITY. bas-relief, representing the temple of a town in Armenia about to fall into the hands of the Assyrians. 1 It is probable that the temple in question, situate within a cold, forest-clad region, was likewise wholly built of wood ; if the Ninevite artist took pains to make a faithful copy of it, this was because he had been struck by its singular aspect, altogether different from the buildings he was wont to put in his pictures. It was a whim of no consequence, one that titillated the imagination, as a remembrance of distant campaigns, but which the Assyrians had no intention of imitating ; their architecture, humble and submissive throughout its career, followed implicitly the prescriptive rules and methods of Chaldaean art. Matters were different with the populations of the west ; for on the one hand they shook off the thraldom of tradition, whilst on the other hand, whenever they looked abroad in Phrygia and Lydia, they beheld types which had originated in wood, but were imitated on stone, in the face of rocks in which Phrygians and Lydians alike hollowed their tombs. If they found there forms and arrangements to their liking, adapted to their taste and needs, there was nothing to prevent their appropriating and making use of them. Hence it comes to pass that the wooden house, as it is built and lined in certain parts of Asia Minor at the present day, may have furnished some of the elements seen in the first essayals of the Greek builder. The particular notion suggested to him in this way was to put a triangular pediment over the rectangular slab of the fa$ade an arrangement whose principle and model he was not likely to discover anywhere among the peoples he frequented. There is less need to insist upon a disposition met with in several tombs of the necropolis and the oldest Greek buildings. We mean to say the slope at the sides which renders the top of the bay narrower than the base (Figs. 75, 79, 92). The arrange- ment is not sufficiently bound up with the processes and exigences of a timber architecture to warrant its being considered as a distinct feature of Phrygian buildings, or explain its presence in other localities, as borrowed from wooden types. The same thing may be said of the meander, which plays so important a part in Phrygian ornament, and which the Greek decorator has so often introduced into his work (Figs. 48, 49, 60). The woollen textiles 1 Hist, of Art, torn. ii. Fig. 190.